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Disney Finally Steps Up in The Game Of Love If any name carries alongside it the definition of True Love, I doubt anybody would argue the name Disney. They’ve been selling True Love Conquers All since 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and people around the world have eaten it up just like the Wicked Queen’s poisoned apple. And unfortunately, that’s sort of what the concept has become: poisoned.
Disney films are incredibly influential when it comes to forming children’s ideas about how the world works. These films are simplistic and formulaic, but they try to instill ideas about morality. They teach the things that we can’t really explain, including concepts like forgiveness, loyalty, determination, and love. But for decades, they have really only told one type of story. Disney has defined true love as something inherently romantic, and children really do pick up on that. All the way up from Snow White and Cinderella until more recent films like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, the plotlines of these movies have all relied heavily on this long-standing sexist, classist, heteronormative “true love” narrative. Even films like The Princess and the Frog and Mulan are examples in this field despite their excellent messages to young girls. These heroines are smart, resourceful, and brave. They work hard and dominate their narratives by acting rather than being acted against. But despite physical prowess, mental acuity, and personal agency, they fall into the same romantic traps as their less progressive counterparts. However, Disney seems to be taking a turn. In last year’s hit Frozen, the writers turned this trope on its head by redefining true love. After spending the entire film focused on romantic love, Princess Anna saves herself by acting on her feelings of love for her sister, Queen Elsa. Rather than being saved by her initial love interest, the villainous Prince Hans or the underdog romantic boyfriend Kristoff, Anna saves her own life with an act of true love. And, for the first time in anybody’s memory, the true love in this story has nothing to do with romance. Or even men. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Memorializing Grandma in Pixels By Fay Funk QuailBellMagazine.com Over the Fourth of July weekend I came across The Atlantic essay “She’s Still Dying on Facebook” about viewing a dead Facebook friend’s account long after she’s gone. It was heartbreaking, sweet, and very relevant. Death in the digital age creates a whole new set of issues to examine, and it’s unfamiliar territory. I have dealt with it myself. Last year my grandmother died of cancer. Her Facebook account still exists—both actually, she had two. Her death opened up a sea of complications about online presence, questions of perspective, the wishes of the living versus the dead, and generational differences. How do you view your Facebook? Do you use it to communicate with your friends or to share your opinions? Is it a tool for self-promotion? A place to stalk crushes? Do you think it’s stupid or fantastic? And just as importantly, how do other people see your Facebook? What will it represent to them when you die? Is it a collection of all your most significant life events and memories, as worthy of preservation as a diary? Or is it the CliffsNotes version of you, meaningless and surface-level? Should it be memorialized or destroyed? I doubt any of us were thinking that hard when we first made our accounts.
Facebook played an incredibly complicated role in the last year of my grandmother’s life, and a lot of that was due to no one really knowing how important it was or was not. It’s why the question of what to do with her accounts is unresolved to this day, and will probably remain unresolved forever. On the one hand, Facebook was revolutionary. All of my grandmother’s friends and family joined a group to share stories, updates, and photos with her. She could connect with everyone, even when she was too sick for visitors, and they could all connect to each other. My mother and aunt ran the group and managed the posts to share with my grandmother. It gave her a lot of comfort and eased her passing. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Power of a Premise When I started really studying film in college, I was still mostly paying attention to Western directors. If I was going to look closely at a film with a lot to read into, it was more likely to be someone American or British, like Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, who had directed it. I did watch some foreign films, but these were from directors known to Western audiences, like Akira Kurosawa. It wasn't until I went to a film club meeting and found my first real exposure to a director who wasn't as well known as Hitchcock or Kurosawa, but quickly became one of my all time favorite directors.
The director was Krzysztof Kieślowski, a director from Poland. Kieślowski began making short films in the 1960s before finally making feature length movies in the late '70s. Kieślowski's films were often stories about people living in Europe during the height of the Soviet Union, or dealing with the years following the collapse. Most stories were set in Poland and had some political subtext involved. More importantly, these were films about the people and the strange things that occurred in their lives. There would often be a religious element to what was happening, or something even stranger at play to cause what happened. The first Kieślowski piece I saw was the first two episodes of The Decalogue, a ten part miniseries he made for television in 1989. Each episode told a story that was heavily inspired by one of the biblical Ten Commandments. No story directly acknowledges the commandment, but each story plays with interpreting the commandment. Although I have yet to see the rest of the series (you can blame Amazon for completely botching that birthday gift), I know that each story is similar in how it presents 1980s Warsaw as this epicenter of faith and the strangeness of the human condition. After that, I got hooked on Kieślowski. I used my first paycheck to order a box set of his Three Colors Trilogy, the last films Kieślowski made before his death in 1996. I might review that series someday after a rewatch, but in that series, Kieślowski created a thematic trilogy, where each film is based on one of the three aspects of the French motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and a particular color of the French flag. Although none of the films have a story that continues into the next, there are some thematic similarities that do end up tying the entire trilogy together. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Uncaged Muses By Deniz Zeynep QuailBellMagazine.com I discovered these two artists during different stages of my life. Jelalludin Rumi in my early twenties and Mademoiselle Chanel in my early teens. The former being my source of much needed wisdom and comfort during a latent adolescence filled with existential questions
(What comes first, love or marriage? What is my calling?) and dark blue cynicism (I have no aura). And Chanel being the epitome of feminine strength that juxtaposed perfectly with my yearning for kohl eyeliner, while continuing to blister my hands and roll my ankles as a tennis player. Flash forward to age 26 and these two artists continue to fill my half-full glass of muse booze. Mademoiselle Chanel was the renegade I admired because of her use of fabric as a symbol of freedom in the early 1920's. Freedom from the corset of stuffy social norms that revolutionized how a woman should feel about herself. Free. Confident. Unapologetically herself. Bonjour, knit jersey, linen, and tweed. À tout à l'heure, boned corsets and gossamer petticoats. Being able to wear loose-fitted materials allowed women the freedom to explore the universe. And to bring that statement down to earth: Chanel's choice of a breezy fabric encouraged women to jump on a horse and go parading through the woods creating her own fairy tale. She could ride her stallion during the day (she has the freedom to choose which kind, too) and paint her lips blood red to dress her needle-sharp wit. As an avid horseback rider, Chanel would wear the clothes of her lovers to keep up with with the male-dominated riders. This simple act of trumping through Nature and wearing the wind instead of lace gloves was the wardrobe change that women needed. The bird officially left the cage. "If you are not born with wings, do nothing to impede their growth." —Mademoiselle Coco Chanel The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Hot and Heavy in 19th-century England Victorian slang is, even by today's standards, versatile, colorful, and covert. Sexual slang was especially clandestine so that gentlemen could discuss taboo matters without drawing undue attention. Since sex in general was a touchy subject, Victorian people got quite creative when devising these terms. Some of those very words still linger in our vernacular today.
So just how much did Victorians beat around the bush? Keep in mind that these were the people who arranged a nuanced form of communication based on flowers. They used “floriography” in order to express feelings that they would have otherwise hidden from society. These are the people who referred to lady parts as the “fruitful vine” because supposedly, they both fruited every nine months and “flowered” on a monthly basis. The only “flowers” I think of in reference to a vagina are orchids (for obvious reasons). I got a whole bouquet of them from my relatives when I got my first period. The world of Victorian prostitutes was a generous segment of the population and therefore ripe with slang. An estimated one out of every twelve women was directly involved in prostitution, a statistic that only applies to unmarried, pubescent women. Much like today, prostitution was multi-leveled. There were the common punks who walked the streets and rich courtesans alike. If a rich man wanted to have sex with a woman who wasn’t his “lawful blanket”(legal wife), he would pursue sexual asylum in a “wife in water colors” or mistress, a “prostitute” whom only serviced one man. If the man was rich enough, he could provide her with housing, mostly for his own convenience. Why was a mistress painted in water colors? Because their “engagements easily dissolved” like water paint. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
20th-century Fashion Accessories As WeaponsSexual harassment is the pits. And as it unfortunately turns out, the deviant desire to cat call, taunt, grope and generally act like a miserable misogynist reaches across time and place. Women have tried various strategies to fend off such behavior through the ages, but one trend during the turn-of-the-century reveals a creative, and sometimes overzealous, tactic for literally sticking it to lecherous men. The so-called “Hatpin Peril” led ladies to use their own decorative accessories to fend off unwanted advances. In the Victorian era, female decorum and reliance on men were de rigeur. But by the cusp of the 20th century, some women were done with the antiquated expectations. Increasingly, ladies came to the conclusion that the time for a stiff upper lip when encountering “mashers”—period slang for predatory men in public—was over. Newspapers across the country started reporting physical retaliations against the skeezes. As the Smithsonian summarizes: A New York City housewife fended off a man who brushed up against her on a crowded Columbus Avenue streetcar and asked if he might “see her home.” A Chicago showgirl, bothered by a masher’s “insulting questions,” beat him in the face with her umbrella until he staggered away. A St. Louis schoolteacher drove her would-be attacker away by slashing his face with her hatpin. Victorian temperance be damned! In addition to their frequency, news reports covering these encounters were notable for their approving tone. While a woman attacking a man had previously been considered comical (silly, silly women!), these female fighters were now praised as heroes with the righteous ability to defend themselves. Social mores, they were a’changing. Working women and suffragists co-opted the phenomenon into their broader call for women’s rights, including the ability to break out of the confines of parents' or husbands' homes, ditch chaperones, and move alone and unharassed in public. At this point, one might expect serious push-back from harbingers of tradition. But surprisingly, most people seemed to see the writing on the wall for women’s increasing freedoms. Instead, detractors focused on deriding the most high-profile mechanism of lady self-defense (or in some cases, probably misguided assaults): the hatpin. Both unconfirmed and verified stories of hatpin-peril abounded. Innocent men were accidentally stabbed by careless women. A hundred female factory workers wielded hatpins at police officers who had arrested two of their coworkers. A woman and her husband’s mistress even circled each other in a high-stakes hatpin duel until police broke it up. One woman’s tool of self-defense was another woman’s weapon. By 1910, the situation (weirdly) looked not unlike the current gun-control debate. City councils in Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Orleans and even as far away as Sydney, Australia, started passing ordinances to regulate hatpin length. Many women rebuffed such interference, with some opting to go to jail rather than pay fines for their pins o’ protection. Who knows how the hatpin controversy may have continued to escalate, had World War I not swooped in to distract social preoccupation and inspire new fashion. Yes, the menacing hatpin was laid to rest as bobs and cloche hats became the new trend—probably for the best. Happily, women remained generally able to move independently in public, though sexual harassment has endured. Perhaps it's time to bring back the bad-ass hatpin? ***This piece first appeared in Ravishly and was republished here with permission. *** #Real #Ravishly #HighOnHistory #History #Feminism #SexualHarrassment #Weapons #Fashion
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What exactly are children's museums curating?I spend a lot of time with kids under the age of 10. I don't have any of my own, but I think kids are fantastic, and babysit them frequently. The way that kids explore the world is a beautiful thing. They usually engage in a more open and honest manner than adults. All kids really need is information, then they've got the lockdown on asking questions. I think it is only when kids are not given all the information, or the context around information, that we shortchange them and set them up for ignorance or failure down the line.
Assuming one doesn't come from a Creationist point of view, one might be inclined to think that places such as the Children's Museum of Richmond and the Science Museum of Virginia would be ideologically safe places to take your kids. From my experiences taking various kids to both of these museums, I would say that, for the most part, they are indeed lovely places for children to grow and explore. Recently, though, I saw something at both museums that put a bad taste in my mouth. At the Children's Museum of Richmond's craft area, they had a "Make a Dream Catcher" table. The table and description had no context for what a dream catcher was, where it comes from, and more importantly WHO it comes from. Dream catchers are a traditional creation of many indigenous groups in North America, including the Cree, Ojibwe, and Sioux. I know, I know, I'm being a fun-killing politically correct cop here. Let the children make their dream catchers in peace, you might say. Maybe in your mind's hierarchy of cultural appropriation, making a dream catcher is a smaller offense than wearing a headdress. And let's not forget that children are still taught to wear headdresses and similarly problematic attire in offensive and inaccurate plays in elementary schools all over this country. But it is worse than just an offense to certain cultures; this omission is shortchanging all kids who see it. Without the context for the dream catcher, kids coming to the Children's Museum are missing out on a lot. Without the history, understanding, and respect for the culture and traditions from which it came, why even call it a dream catcher? It's some tangle strings! Call it a spider web! The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Frozen ≠ MulanAs I sit here on Independence Day, friendless and without a good enough Internet connection to watch Netflix, I can't help but think about how I didn't like Frozen. I think this movie is really overrated, and not even half as good as its predecessor Tangled. And even more than that, it's hailed as being a feminist movie. And yes, you are about to read a grown man's ramblings about a Disney movie. Be preparrrrrrrred! (Get it?)
Now, out of the numerous things that I could write about, such as the inevitable decay of America's democratic system, or the shameful and persistent dumbing down of our culture through our entertainment system, or how 40 million or so people around the world are still enslaved, or about the Bilderberg Group, or about the Duke University adult actress Belle Knox, even I am left scratching my noggin about how important it is for ME to express my opinions on a Disney movie. Although, a recent conversation with a friend, in which she lauded the feminist intentions behind Frozen, has proven to be more than enough motivation for me to make my case. Frozen may be a lot of things. It could be the "best Disney movie since the Lion King." I'll leave that to personal opinion. It could be a deconstruction of the Disney model, even though I would beg to differ. But one thing I shall never concede to is that Frozen is a feminist movie. I take this stance because with full heart I wish to believe that if I have a daughter one day, I will not let her see this movie. First, let's examine the primary motivations for the two central female protagonists, Elsa and Anna. In Screenwriting 101, you learn that it is important to establish good motivations for your main character(s). Although, what is more important is the character's actions, as these are the circumstances that determine the journey they will take, the plot of the story, and the overall reason any bozo will go see your movie. This is like how the real world works, as actions speak louder than…I forget how the rest of that goes. So what does Elsa want? To be understood. To be with her sister. Cool. (See what I did there?) How does Elsa enact the plot? Has a panic attack and isolates herself from the rest of the world so that she can't use her…ice powers. Her famous catchy song, "Let It Go"? In the context of the movie, at the exact moment she sings it, she is singing about giving up her responsibilities not just to her sister and her kingdom, but to herself. Things in her life have become too overwhelming, and she has chosen to let it go and ignore it. It is not a song about self-empowerment. It's a song about being selfish. She proceeds to keep the entire kingdom frozen, which has presumably killed all of the cute furry animals that are not elk. And Elsa doesn't change her mind about it until she almost kills her sister, at the very end of the movie, and the kingdom cheers her about it because she decided not to leave them in a perpetual winter…for once. Simba also escaped his kingly duties…when he was a kid…and his father just died before his eyes…and lions don't have governments or taxation departments to run. So is this necessarily non-feminist? No. It's just bad moral values. Elsa doesn't demonstrate that she has any moral fiber to stand up for herself and be who she wants to be. She just kind of decides to slowly kill everyone in the kingdom instead. Elsa never outwardly admits that what she did was wrong, nor does she change her mind because of it. So whatever, I guess freezing entire kingdoms isn't an ethical issue. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Rebirth of My IdentityIt was my first day of elementary school in the U.S. My lunchbox was full of grapes and carrots and my stomach was full of butterflies. As I walked up to the group of kids lining up outside the school, I turned to look at my mother. I wanted to be brave but I didn’t want her to leave. She signaled which line I belonged in, hugged me goodbye, and left. I walked over to the line, stood behind a girl with straight blond hair and waited to see what would happen next.
Everyone around me was chatting and laughing. I looked around and wondered how many of these kids previously knew each other and how many were just meeting for the first time. Soon various women and a man came out and began to take us all inside. I followed the crowd into the first grade area and proceeded to go into the same classroom as the blond girl in front of me had gone into. Everyone began looking for their corresponding desk. I joined in, found my desk, and sat down. The enthusiastic man from that morning went to the front of the room and began saying speaking very quickly. That’s when it hit me—my teacher was going to teach the class in English, a language I did not speak. It was September 1997 in Arlington, Virginia, and although I had been born there, I had moved to Guatemala and fully developed my Spanish and forgot any English that I had known beforehand. We had moved back to Arlington a month before school started, leaving me very little time to learn any English at all. I knew the basics like 'hello' and 'thank you' but nowhere near enough to gain anything from my classes at school. It felt like I had been thrown into the deep end for the first time and had to either sink or swim. I went from class to class mimicking my peers and hoping that I didn’t take a misstep. After lunch, I was instructed to go to a room. I wasn’t sure what I had done but followed instructions and walked on over. I sat down at my desk and scanned the room. It was the first time that day that I was in a room of other students that also spoke no English. Excited at the possibility of making friends, I asked around if anyone spoke Spanish. No luck. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Happy July 4th from The Quail Bell Crew!#Real #July4th #IndependenceDay #Summer2014 #SummerHolidays #VintageImage #VintagePostcard #VintageChildren Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
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The SOBs that have haunted me "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -H.P. Lovecraft Like a lot of people from Boston, my grandmother has a story about notorious gangster James "Whitey" Bulger. Bulger, her story goes, was doing some shopping in a Somerville liquor store where her brother-in-law William worked. Bulger and William chatted for a bit, and the topic eventually turned to the pending indictment against Bulger. "They say you killed 27 guys," said William. "That's bullshit," Bulger responded. "I ain't killed any more than 18 guys."
Throughout my life, there have been three different people, one at a time, who I've considered the most evil, frightening, depraved SOB imaginable. From around the ages of five to 12, it was Adolf Hitler; from 12 to 16, it was Osama bin Laden; since then, it's been Whitey Bulger. There have been minor auxiliaries (Slobadan Milosevic, the Beltway Sniper, a couple of really mean girls from high school), but those guys were always the big three. Obviously Hitler's position in the queue didn't derive from any relevance he had to my life. He's just a universal, enduring symbol of out-of-control evil (that's why everyone on the other side of the political spectrum from you is just like him, doncha know) who died nearly fifty years before I was born. Bin Laden and Bulger, on the other hand, are spiritual cousins in this for two reasons: One, they did what they did within my lifetime, and two, more disturbingly, both vanished without a trace. Both of their respective threats have been neutralized now. Bin Laden was of course killed in a military raid in 2011, and later that summer, Bulger was captured in Santa Monica by the FBI after 15 years in the wind. Last year, after a trial such as only Boston could produce, he was sentenced to two life terms in prison plus five years. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Abby Cadabby's Treasure TroveIf you ever want to lose all joy and wonder with theme parks, work for one. Don't get me wrong, I love working at Busch Gardens Williamsburg. I wouldn't work there for five seasons if I didn't enjoy it overall. As fair warning, you need to be really careful where you work in an environment like a theme park. You can try to work rides and get forced into custodial business every now and then (like my sister did). You can pick a job that sounds fun like culinary, but spend most of your time working in extreme heat, watching as you realize just how much food gets wasted at the end of the day.
Then you can be like me and attach yourself to Merchandise and let it consume you. When I first started working at Busch Gardens in my senior year of high school, I was hired to be a Games Attendant. I worked a few weeks there, had some fun, but then didn't return until the summer after my freshman year of college. After working a summer in the heat and throwing my voice out repeating the same jargon, I grew tired of Games and decided to switch. I decided to remain in Merchandise since it was a field I was familiar with, and asked to work Retail the next year. When asked where I wanted to work, I chose Abby Cadabby's Treasure Trove, the gift shop in the Sesame Street Forest of Fun. I really should have thought this out more. A year later, I was back in Williamsburg and ready to spend my summer working in the cute little gift shop filled with all the characters from Sesame Street. To be fair to the store, I did actually enjoy working in it. I did find that switching from Games to Retail was a good move on my part, and I found it easy to integrate into the environment it called for. I also did like the store as an entity. My heart melted at all the adorable merchandise for sale, and I was okay dealing with guests and all their complaints. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Do you remember Rebecca Resnick? Do you remember Rebecca Resnick? She was a Jewish girl who lived down the street from me when I was growing up in the Conejo Valley. Rebecca and I were friends and went to the same high school. Rebecca didn’t like the way she looked. She wanted to look like a WASP, so she straightened her curly brown hair and bleached it blond. She tanned her porcelain white skin every weekend in her backyard, next to her black-bottomed pool, the one with the little waterfall coming down from the Jacuzzi. She would slather Hawaiian Tropic oil all over her body, frying like a little piece of Gentile bacon. Do you remember her now? In the tenth grade, she turned anorexic. For a year, she lived on Diet Sprites, which she drank through a straw because it took longer to consume that way and therefore made her feel fuller, less hungry. But she would get hungry eventually, and when she did eat, she would eat a single rice cake. She got so skinny, her ribs stuck out, and her cheeks became gaunt. It was disturbing, because in World History class, we had to watch those black-and-white movies of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. There was Rebecca Resnick, sitting right next to me, looking so hungry, starving—emaciated. It wasn’t that I thought it was ironic; I just found it sad.
Her parents had come from New York to Southern California for a new life. Her dad did something to do with the movies. Before Rebecca became anorexic—before she decided she wanted to look like a Protestant surfer girl—she had been a fat goth. That’s what she called herself anyway. She used to Dep her hair so that one side stuck to her scalp while the other stuck straight out like a rooster comb over her ear. She was going for that Robert Smith look. The Cure was the first concert we ever went to. We went to see them when they came to the Hollywood Palladium. My mom drove us there, and we told her she had to drop us off around the corner, so the other kids waiting in line wouldn’t see us getting out of my mom’s station wagon. Then my mom drove off to sit in some café for two hours to wait. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
What We Talk About When We Talk about MixtapesBy Christopher Sloce QuailBellMagazine.com Here’s what an emotionally abusive relationship taught me, because what are such relationships if not a Code of Hammurabi from a nonsense country, a Wackyland where the dodo never existed and you love the monsters? Emotionally abusive relationships are, at core, rules put in place by fearful people for vulnerable ones, where any transgression is punishable by death, slow or otherwise.
So the lessons are as follows: don’t let someone doubt your importance, that’s what bad employers are for; you’re not a cog you can order from a catalogue. Don’t date anyone who reminds you constantly how unattractive you are to them. Cutting off contact isn’t a show of cowardice but is simply necessary, so your ex can’t call you to later talk about how they found themselves. Don’t read their blog, and doubly don’t read it if you “got over” it the best you could. Get through the night as healthily as possible. Talk to people who like you. Human cruelty is universal. You yourself have been cruel and all that is left is to avoid cruelty, and how knowing of cruelty may make it a harder thing to politicize, and how now you will struggle when you see it. How to make a good mixtape: The aforementioned lessons are necessary to learn, but they are not easy. Mixtapes might seem like a frivolity compared to those lessons, but mixtapes are life enhancing, and as one thousand magazines will tell you, it’s the accessories that stick out. It’s the meals and drinks and showers and the beds you own. It’s mixtapes. For a certain kind of relationship, mixtapes might be cliché, but there’s a few reasons that mixtapes have stuck around. It’s a chance to show you’re not a slack jawed yokel and that your taste is excellent and, by proxy, the person receiving your mixtape is excellent. Mixtapes are a place to intimate and give hints (of course, don’t be an idiot and I’m not to be directed to in case of injury). A mixtape says, this is what it sounds like in my head. It’s synesthetic for as long as you’re willing to drive yourself nuts to get everything in its right place. |
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